In an early '90s PSA, Pee Wee Herman, red bow tie and all, looked straight into the camera and said that every time you use crack, you run the risk of dying. During that time, D.A.R.E., or Drug Abuse Resistance Education, was sending police officers into elementary school classrooms, carrying the message that marijuana is a gateway drug. In the year 2000, MTV and Oprah professed that ecstasy melts holes in your brain. With the distortion of time, these discredited claims have concretized as myth.

What was D.A.R.E.’s impact?

Research shows that campaigns of zero tolerance and scare tactics may backfire, sparking the curiosity to experiment. Based on outcomes of randomized controlled trials, D.A.R.E made an Emory University researcher's list of “Psychological Treatments that Cause Harm.” In a 2002 review of D.A.R.E., psychologist Chudley Werch and health educator Deborah M. Owen reported a tendency for teens who went through D.A.R.E. to be more likely to drink and smoke than adolescents not exposed to the program.

“When I was in fifth grade, a police officer came into our classroom every week to talk to us about drugs and tobacco,” said Luisa Dahlstedt, 15, a sophomore at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in the Northwest suburbs. “He told us crazy things like if we did any of this stuff, our chances of dying were very high.” Luisa said the officer was a D.A.R.E officer.

While there is much contention regarding what schools should be telling their students about drugs, given the rates of premature death from opiate overdose seen in young people today, experts agree something must be done. Exactly what to tell young people depends on who you ask.

Lenny Gilmore/RedEye

Chelsea A. Laliberte of Live4Lali speaks during a presentation to high school students at Stevenson High School on November 12, 2015.

Chelsea A. Laliberte of Live4Lali speaks during a presentation to high school students at Stevenson High School on November 12, 2015.

(Lenny Gilmore/RedEye)

‘We need to be talking about drugs in a much more realistic way’

Kathleen Kane-Willis, director of the Illinois Consortium on Drug Policy at Roosevelt University, fears that drug education for teens is still behind the times.

“I think we need to be talking about drugs in a much more realistic way, and we’re not doing that,” she said. “But the fact that we can now have a conversation around heroin is an improvement.”

Kane-Willis noted that not long ago, heroin wasn’t even allowed to be brought up in school drug education. It was relegated to a shadowy category called “other drugs,” she said.

Students deserve to make their own choices and they deserve to know all of the information, not just a segment selected to prove a point or push an agenda.— Chelsea Laliberte, executive director of Live4Lali, a non-profit group

Should students be ‘scared straight’ out of drug use?

Jerry Otero is the youth policy manager at the Drug Policy Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit with the principal goal of ending the American war on drugs. Like Kane-Willis, Otero said that he emphasizes that young people need to have a more sane and realistic relationship with drugs, which he said are a fact of life.

“When it comes to young people, we rely on cynical tropes like, ‘They are out of control—they need to be scared straight!’ and ‘Drugs have their own gravitational pull and all use will always end badly,’ [which] inform our response,” Otero said.

“School-based drug education may in fact be at odds with itself," he said. "School is presumably a place where you encourage critical thinking, but this abstinence-only, zero-tolerance style drug education is really just bent on messaging.”

Heroin-specific education, overdose prevention

(Lenny Gilmore)

Kane-Willis and her team at Roosevelt conducted focus groups on young people ages 18 to 24 who had used an illicit substance while in high school. The majority felt they were told partial truths, and information about heroin was almost nonexistent.

That isn’t the case at Stevenson, where the nurses on staff were the first in Lake County to be trained in administering naloxone, an opiate antagonist that reverses the effects of overdose.

Community activists from a nonprofit group called Live4Lali provided the naloxone training. The group also speaks to sophomores during their health class as part of the school's new drug education curriculum.

“You’re all smart, you’re not dumb, and for anyone to treat you any other way is an insult,” Chelsea Laliberte, executive director of Live4Lali, said during a presentation to the sophomore students in November. Laliberte lost her younger brother, Alex, to an overdose in 2008, and has since committed herself to overdose prevention activism.

Laliberte told RedEye that Live4Lali’s approach is antithetical to old programs such as D.A.R.E. “A lot of us went to this high school,” she said. “We’re part of this community. We don’t tell the students what to think or what to do.”

“Students deserve to make their own choices, and they deserve to know all of the information, not just a segment selected to prove a point or push an agenda,” she said.

Stevenson’s substance abuse education: More than just drugs

Lenny Gilmore/RedEye

Sarah Comm, 21, speaks to a group of high school students at Stevenson High School, located in the Northwest suburbs, during a presentation organized by drug awareness group Live4Lali.

Sarah Comm, 21, speaks to a group of high school students at Stevenson High School, located in the Northwest suburbs, during a presentation organized by drug awareness group Live4Lali.

(Lenny Gilmore/RedEye)

Live4Lali's recent presentation on opiates at Stevenson was not bound to drugs and their potential harms. Self-esteem, mental health and bullying were frequently mentioned. And rather than utilizing societal judgment or tough love toward drug users, their message was bent on compassion.

“For myself and the Stand Strong Coalition [a local group focused on preventing drinking and drug use among youth in the community], we do not look at this as a moral or legal issue but rather a health concern, given the potential negative impact of drugs on the developing brain and body,” Cristina Cortesi, Stevenson’s substance abuse prevention coordinator, told RedEye.

Sarah Comm, 21, has been in recovery from drugs and alcohol for two years, and graduated from Stevenson in 2013. In a speech delivered to students as part of Live4Lali's presentation, she paused to address the young women of the class in particular. “I was so uncomfortable with myself,” she said. “That’s part of why I used. Just be OK with being yourself, that’s what people are attracted to: authenticity.”

Response to this new method of drug education

Tanvee Patankar, 15, a sophomore at Stevenson, recalled that in fifth grade, “We were told to ‘just say no,’ and that drugs are bad.”

After hearing Live4Lali’s session on opiates, Tanvee said, “I felt I was taught a lot more about drugs than I was in the past. I’m more aware of what’s going on around me now… it’s a little bit scary.”

She added, “I feel pretty sure that I’ll never do heroin.”

Her classmate Luisa remarked how different the experience was from her previous drug education.

“I think there’s a big difference. Back then, there was a police officer, so of course it’s being told from a legal standpoint that drugs are bad,” she said. “This felt more real. Real people, real situations. I could relate more.”

Both Luisa and Tanvee walked away feeling a bit of hope for drug users.

“It’s not just, ‘Oh you’ll die and go to jail,’ it’s real people with real problems, they’re just like all of us,” Tanvee said.

When a son’s fatal drug overdose motivates positive change

Denise Cullen still has photos of her son Jeffrey posing next to his first surfboard wearing a D.A.R.E. T-shirt. He died of an accidental drug overdose in 2008, but his death was not in vain.

Since she took on the role of executive director of Grief Recovery After a Substance Passing (GRASP), Denise and her husband, Gary, have played instrumental roles in the lives of families who have lost loved ones to overdose.

Cullen is also a social worker and believes young people shouldn’t be subjected to war stories and scare tactics as part of drug education. She recommends that parents and teachers use the Drug Policy Alliance’s program called “Safety First: A Reality-Based Approach to Teens and Drugs.”

She is also a big fan of Andrew Weil and his book “From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know about Mind-Altering Drugs.” She believes these are effective ways to educate teens about drugs that don’t involve half-truths and threats of potential harm.

Zachary Siegel is a RedEye contributor.

You can find our coverage online and in print every Wednesday this year. As ever, we'd like to hear your feedback. If you want us to consider sharing your stories related to addiction in our publication, please send them toredeye@redeyechicago.com with "Addiction" in the subject line.